Daily Archives: February 15, 2015

On February 12, 2015, Mr. Lou Verrecchio, a noted Catholic Apologist from the United States of America, explained the true nature of charity when criticizing the Holy Father and other Catholics on matters of the faith.

Since his talk contains some important distinctions of which many Catholics are not well instructed, we repost it here from his blog, Harvesting the Fruit of Vatican II. The video is in Vimeo format.

At Mr. Verrechio’s blog you can read more about the topics he discusses and get the link for Michael Voris’s video.

The From Rome blog will only note here, that the proper response to the expression of heresy and heretical intend of clergy, is not just prayer and faith and public denunciation, but requires in grave matters a formal written denunciation to the ecclesiastical authority capable of punishing the guilty cleric, or in the case of what clear appears to be the intentions of “Team Bergoglio” the organization of national and international Catholic collaborative initiatives necessary to preserve the faith in the face of the prospect of the public apostasy of a large number of the bishops led by the Pope against the teaching of Jesus Christ.

The From Rome blog will have news of such an association in the next few days. We ask our readers to think long and hard, and weigh in their soul the immeasurable value of the true Faith and what sacrifices they will make to see the Church is not overtaken by a heretical sect proposing communion for all and/or the acceptance of sodomy.

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Rome, February 15, 2015: In his homily this morning, at the Vatican, Pope Francis told the Cardinals that “The road of the Church is not to condemn anyone eternally”. In his homily, which was published minutes ago in Italian, he went on to say, that God “embraces and welcomes by reintegrating and transfiguring evil into good, condemnation into salvation, exclusion into proclamation” of welcome.

The discourse as a whole, spoke about the need to go to the peripheries:

Consequently, charity cannot be neutral, ascetic, indifferent, tepid or impartial! Charity is contagious, it impassions, it risks, it co-involves! Because true charity is always unmerited, unconditional and gratuitous! (cf. 1 Cor. 13). Charity is creative in finding a proper language to communicate with all who have been considered incurable and hence untouchable. To find the just language … Contact is the true communicative language, the same affective language which transmitted healing to the leper. How many cures we can accomplish and transmit by learning this language of contact! He was a leper and he became an announcer of God’s love. The Gospel says: « But he went off and set out proclaiming and publishing the deed » (Mk, 1:45).

(Translation: our own)

A grave misreading of Scripture

Unfortunately, the healing of the leper by Our Lord, was not what the Pope is proposing. He was not healed by contact with another human body, or by human words; he was healed by an act of the Will and Power of God Himself, the Incarnate One, and hence the Anointed par excellence, the Christ.

And though we are all called to have the charity to help the sick and the outcast, we cannot heal or love in the same manner God does. For God first loves a thing, and only then does it come into being; and when He finds moral depravity, He first wills to cure it and then the immoral person if he accepts the grace, becomes good.

We on the other hand cannot command the power of God or the grace of God or the mercy of God and apply it to whomsoever we wish, or to whichsoever category of sinner we want.

That is why Christ commanded the Apostles to preach, first, faith and penance, then to lay hands upon those who believed.

This point needs to be emphasized. There is absolutely no case in the entire Gospel where a non-believer was cured by Our Lord.

This point needs more emphasis. There is absolutely no case in all of Scripture where God has revealed, said, promised or declared that He has any desire to heal or cure the impenitent.

A False Gospel leads to a False Pastoral Practice

The error of thinking that these 2 points are not important leads directly into the error and heresy of Cardinal Kasper, which Pope Francis has done everything to promote. Even in this homily to the newly created Cardinals he cannot conceal, as much as a Jesuit can, his malignant intent.

For this reason the Church has never allowed public sinners to approach the Sacrament. She has always taught, and Her laws have always held, that public sinners must be excluded. Only if they repent, can they be readmitted. In the ancient Church Lent came into being as the time for which public sinners would do public penance, before being readmitted for Easter though the sacraments of Penance and Eucharist.

In later centuries, when the Catholic Faith embraced the whole of society, the practice of public penance was only reserved for greater public crimes, such as that of kings or rulers. For nearly 1000 years, Catholics have done their penances in private after going to confession.

Thus, Holy Mother Church has defended the Infinite Dignity of the Immaculate Son of God the Father, present in the Eucharist, from the defilement of a sacrilegious communion.

This does not mean that many clergy, even bishops or popes or cardinals never gave communion to public sinners. For the sins of individuals do not constitute the Church’s praxis. Rather, all who did so merited justly everlasting damnation in the fires of Hell. And all who do so today, will merit the same, if they do not repent.

For this reason, it is Cardinal Burke, who is the most charitable of all the Cardinals, since it is he, nearly alone, who has publicly defended, even at personal cost, the duty of sacred pastors to refuse communion to those in irregular situations, such as divorced, cohabiting, etc. or practicing sodomites. He is more charitable, because true charity seeks the true salvation of the sinner; a salvation which cannot be obtained without the sinner being told he is a sinner and worthy only of condemnation, and that penance and a change of morals is the only way to be worthy of the free gift of God’s saving mercy.

It is actions like those of this Cardinal, not homilies of the Pope, which reflect faithfully the teaching which the Church has received from Christ and the Apostles.

Needless to say, to twist the plain sense of scripture for heretical purposes, is itself a grave sin of sacrilege, meriting eternal damnation not only for those who do this, but for those who consent to such evil use.

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Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism (Photo c/o The Basics of Philosophy, click image to access)

Editorial, Rome, February 15, 2015: Stoicism was ancient pagan philosophy which taught that every excess of human emotion was evil, and that man should seek to perfect himself by the application of right reason to his affections. Since the Stoic philosophers of ancient times taught a system of ethics similar in many things to Christianity, they were often cited by the Fathers and later writers with approbation. But in recent centuries, some authors forgot the underlying error and departed from a sound send of human nature under the influence of the 16th century rationalists, who abandoned Christian doctrine and morals and took up once again the ancient pagan philosophers as their guides.

A common error, therefore, is found in many books which advocate “spirituality”, an error drawn from the system of the Stoics. It says that one must never allow emotions to arrive at intense levels, especially anger, which is the emotion which naturally is most disordering of right reason.

A stoic, for example, will always confess getting angry. For to him anger is an evil passion.

A Catholic, however, knows better, taking as he does Our Lord Jesus Christ as his role model of virtue. Remembering that Christ got so angry at the avarice of those who had care for His Father’s House, the Temple of old in Jerusalem, that He went so far as to make an impromptu whip out of the rope available at hand, and used it to drive the money lenders out of the outer court of the Temple: a Catholic understands that there are things worthy of getting angry about, and that to allow such passion is not a sin, but a virtue.

This is not to say, that anger can be unjust or excessive. It is unjust when it is directed against what is not evil or threatening; it is excessive when it exceeds the bounds of what is needful or appropriate to the evil opposed.

For this reason, it is a very good thing if a Catholic would allow himself to get angry when a Catholic bishop would use his sacred office to promote error, even as regards the natural world. Such an error as the global-warming mania, which puts the blame on the variations of solar radiation on humans. Everyone with any concept of physics, understands that the magnitudes of scale are so great between the variations of the output of solar radiation and any effect human activity, even of all 6-8 Billion of us, that the latter could never ever effect the human climate in any appreciable manner. And thus the sane and impartial know that the global-warming mania is just that, a mania, a phobia: and if you look deeper, you will find that it is a phobia promoted by international socialists, who to convince those opposed to socialism to accept the socialist agenda of societal reorganization, use the phobia of climate change.

Writers, therefore, are justly angered that this is what Pope Francis is to do in his upcoming encyclical letter on the environment.

One such writer had strong words about the Pope on this issue:

It comes as no surprise. Handwriting has been on the wall along the Viale Vaticano from the get-go. At the beginning of his pontificate, Francis revealed himself to be fastidiously attuned to image. He refused to give communion in public ceremonies lest he be photographed giving the sacrament to the wrong kind of sinner. So, when he agreed to pose between two well-known environmental activists and brandish an anti-fracking T-shirt, we believed what we saw.

It was a portentous image. Press toads hopped to their keyboards to correct the evidence of our lying eyes. Francis was neither for nor against fracking, you see. Nothing of the sort. He was simply using a photo-op to assert blameless solidarity with the victims of ecological injustice. (Both a decisive definition of such injustice and its particular victims went unspecified.)

If that restyling were true, then the more fool Francis. But Francis is not a fool. He is an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist. His clumsy intrusion into the Middle East and covert collusion with Obama over Cuba makes that clear. Megalomania sends him galloping into geopolitical—and now meteorological—thickets, sacralizing politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.

Later this year, Francis will take his sandwich board to the United Nations General Assembly, that beacon of progress toward the Kingdom. Next will come a summit of world religions—a sort of Green Assisi—organized to lend moral luster to an upcoming confederacy of world improvers in Paris. In the words of Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Francis means “to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.”

There is a muddle for you. The bishop asserts a causal relation between two undefined, imprecise phenomena. His phrasing is a sober-sounding rhetorical dodge that eludes argument because the meaning is indeterminable. Ambiguity, like nonsense, is irrefutable. What caliber of scientist speaks this way?

Steve Skojec, over at OnePeterFive, upon reading these words, makes a very good observation:

Mullarkey’s is only the latest thrust in a battle that has been going on for the better part of the Francis papacy. This, sadly, is what it looks like when you “make a mess” in the Church – division, bitterness, and venom. Amidst the salvos back and forth between the various camps, however, thinking Catholics are faced with a growing suspicion that the powers in Rome see the Church differently than the rest of us. Rather than an institution founded by Christ to convert the world and bring about the salvation of souls, they seem to prefer that she more closely resemble a trendy social-issues NGO. As our own Eric Sammons wrote last week, what the Church has been doing for the past half century hasn’t worked; the practice of the faith is decimated, leaving only a tiny minority of Catholics embracing their religion in an orthodox fashion. The impression that this is no accident is only enhanced when hand-picked papal advisers support communist, pro-abortion, and pro-homosexual institutions, or simply foment heresy in the pope’s name. Making matters worse, the Extraordinary Synod on Marriage and Family produced a public work so deviant from Catholic teaching that it caused one bishop to declare it “the first time in Church history that such a heterodox text was actually published as a document of an official meeting of Catholic bishops under the guidance of a pope” and something that “will remain for the future generations and for the historians a black mark which has stained the honour of the Apostolic See.”

Mr. Skojec goes on to say that both sides in the Church, which is dividing between the liberal and conservative camps, need to tone down the rhetoric and use less angry words. While I agree that unjust anger and excessive anger, even in just things, is morally wrong, I disagree with Mr. Skojec when he suggests that both sides need to respond similarly.